The Classics department received a significant donation that will endow a lecture series, professorship, and summer programming. The department will be renamed the Eve Adler Department of Classics.
Donations such as this are normally named in honor of the donor, as with the Albert A. Mead Professorship of Biology and the John G. McCullough Professorship of Chemistry. Since the donation was made anonymously, the department chose to remember Eve Adler, an influential figure in its history.
Eve Adler worked at the College for over 25 years, and is credited with revitalizing the department during three different College presidencies. Originally appointed in 1977 to develop new programs in Latin, Greek, and Classical Hebrew, Adler chaired the Classics department for 16 of those 25 years.
“Eve was definitely outside of the box in the way she approached everything and also in the way she approached this field,” Professor of Classics Marc Witkin said. “She was somebody who had a tremendous breadth of interests and abilities. She saw that courses on Classics in translation appealing to students in all disciplines at the College held the key to the survival of the Greek and Latin programs at Middlebury. In the decades since her chairmanship, the department has flourished by continuing to follow her curricular design.”
The donation has a framework for how much of the yearly income can be used for different purposes. So far, the department has established the Eve Adler Memorial Fund for Summer Study in Classics/Classical Studies and an annual Eve Adler Memorial Lectureship.
According to the Fund for Summer Study application, “The fund is intended primarily to support students who wish, during the summer, to study Greek and Latin language, literature, and art, or to participate in archaeological fieldwork at a Classical site.”
The site says that priority will be given to Classics/Classical Studies majors and minors, but that all students with interests related to Classics may apply. Five students have already received grant funding from the department for study this summer.
With the endowment funds, the Classics Department also hopes to bring at least one named lecturer a year to Middlebury. On April 13, Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, delivered the first Eve Adler Memorial Lecture.
When asked about whom the Department will invite to give the Memorial Lecture, Witkin said the Lecture will make Classics accessible to many disciplines.
“We’re open to having people outside the Classics,” Witkin said, “but we’re going to try as much as possible within the field of Classics to bring speakers here who are well known and who can bring Classics to a lot of different people in a lot of different fields.”
In addition to summer funding and academic-year programming, the donation will secure a second endowed professorship for the Classics Department. While Witkin said that the department’s overall enrollments and the number of Classics and Classical Studies majors are stronger than ever, administration claims that the tendency of today’s students to “shy away from text-based materials” has led some professors to worry that Classics at the College might be dismantled or defunded in the name of irrelevance.
“[The donation] means that in the future it would be harder for some administration to say, ‘Can’t afford to have a classics department,’” Witkin said.
